You should have a jumpstart on your reviews from some of your best clients now. After yesterday’s challenge, I hope you are excited to start getting feedback from every client that you work with. It is one thing as a partner in your firm to have a goal of getting feedback from all clients, but you are busy running a law firm and practicing law for your clients therefore you have to get your entire team on board to help you meet this goal.

If you are serious about building a culture of customer satisfaction which will really move your online reviews to a new level, we recommend starting with an incentive to your team. We have seen many clients of ours have success with an incentive or reward for their staff based on customer feedback and online review goals.

Some ideas include:

A team goal each month (or quarter) of 100% of (internal) client feedback forms completed rewarded by a team incentive of $500 for each staff member.

Individual goals to your staff for authentic reviews they are able to get their clients to put online after the internal feedback forms are reviewed. We have seen firms do things like $25 for every review in the beginning to get things jumpstarted and then move to something like a gift card of $100 for every 10 online review.

A quarterly award with a bonus for the best customer satisfaction adjustment made based on reviewing feedback forms.

I have seen law firms go from 3 or 4 reviews to over 100 reviews and additional testimonials for their websites in under 12 months with these strategies. You don’t want 100 new reviews in a month as that will throw up some red flags to google, but if you build this into your process you can get at least five to ten reviews a month each and every month.

With the incentives above, you can also build a strategy to have your team reach out to your clients after 30 days, 90 days, and six months to see if there is anything else your client may need or any questions they have and again encourage a few more reviews from people that didn’t leave you one earlier. On top of possibly getting some reviews, probably even more important, you are staying top of mind with these former clients and reminding them that you are here to help their friends and family with the various practice areas your firm provides.

One attorney told me that the small investment in these types of incentives really showed his team that they were serious about improving customer satisfaction and within months it snowballed into more positive changes implemented by his team than he could have ever imagined.

I will also tell you that these small incentives that reward positive behavior are a lot cheaper than paying a reputation management and PR firm to create a plan to hide all the bad online reviews that come from poor client satisfaction

Most of the changes will likely be simple things to implement but have a big impact. I have heard one firm say that when they started asking clients how they want to be communicated to (email, phone, text) and following through on that drove satisfaction way up. Another said that they added the ability to take credit card payments after that was a top item of frustration on the feedback forms.

What will you learn about your firm? If you are in the thick of things every day and trying to practice law to the best of your ability for your clients, you are likely missing a lot of little things that could propel you client’s happiness forward.

Remember what we said earlier, when surveyed and when you look at the online reviews, most client satisfaction issues are not based on the outcome of a client’s case, they are based on the service and communication with your team that they received along the way. The good news about that is while you don’t have full control of a client’s outcome due to judges, juries, etc. you do have full control of the client service and interactions with your team.

While this challenge is only 30 days, today I want you to think about what incentives you can put in place to build your culture of client satisfaction and create raving fans of your firm, leading to an increase in referrals, and great word-of-mouth support in more and more online reviews.